[set_id=72157622456230402]
Our latest adventure in early September took us to Idaho Falls, Idaho, for two purposes. First, it would serve as a base for exploring Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons National Parks, and it would provide a visit to Idaho, thus taking us closer to completing our adventure of visiting all 50 states together. Tim now lacks only Hawaii and perhaps next year we will hop that portion of the really big pond and take that last state off the map.
I confess that I have made a terrible mistake in my handling of this narrative. I have waited far too long to write it following the actual trip, so my memories of it are pretty well faded already, which really shouldn’t surprise any of you reading this. I find myself getting confused between this visit, which I barely remember, and the one I made years ago, which I remember quite well. I should have written this earlier, ‘tis true, but this really isn’t the best time for me, being at the nadir of my functional curve, waiting for another IV juicing in September to reset the batteries so to speak.
But, not all is lost, for I did have my trusty flip notepad with me to make notes of things I thought might be entertaining to write about. In this habit, I am very much like my hero, David Sedaris. If you find yourself in New York City, Paris, or just about any other city really, and see a guy scribbling in a flip pad, take a close look: is it Matthew or is it David Sedaris? I’ll give you a hint: I am MUCH taller than David.
The flight was most notable for the fact that it left exactly on time and arrived early. We had an unusual mid-day flight, timed for connections to Idaho Falls, and I was surprised to find that when I woke from sleep, as I usually sleep easily on planes, that I was a sweaty mess! Then I touched my window screen and rapidly pulled my hand back from the intense heat. The sun was shining so brightly and so intensely on the windows of the plane that we were all roasting in the cabin. I can’t imagine how much worse it must have been back in Coach, but then I wouldn’t know about that.
Since we had some time in Salt Lake City, we tried to get on the earlier flight to Idaho Falls, which you wouldn’t think would be a big deal. I mean, how many people do you think want to go to Idaho Falls on any given day? Yeah, I didn’t think so either, and yet, as it was, the flight was oversold. So, we were committed to three hours in the Salt Lake City airport. We could have taken the free shuttle to the main temple complex of the Latter Day Saints, you know them as the Mormons, but really, what was the point? They won’t let you in if you don’t know the secret password, handshake, have the magic underwear on, something to restrict it from infidels. Now, don’t go all bristly and get up in arms. Saudi Arabia won’t even let you into the city of Mecca if you are non-believer, but the Mormons will let you into Salt Lake City, and they will even let you have a drink now without becoming a member of a private club. Progress in the salty state.
I have to say that Idaho Falls is all that I expected, meaning not much. But it served its purpose well enough, being a way station and place to hang one’s hat for a few nights. And, as the name implies, it is in Idaho, so once we landed and exited the airport (airports alone don’t count) Tim could count Idaho as visited.
Idaho Falls doesn’t do justice to Idaho as a state and I have had the chance to see more of it outside of the far eastern part where we were. It really does have a great deal of geographic diversity, lovely wilderness, the Snake River and its amazing gorge through red rock canyons, and the capital Boise is surprisingly hip and fun. Yes, there were some militias up in the panhandle once upon a time, but they are mostly long gone, and those guys moved to Idaho from the south and east. They were not in fact Idahoans themselves, so give the state a break. And about that panhandle, it really shouldn’t be there. Montana was supposed to be smaller, ending with the westernmost edge of the Continental Divide, meaning Idaho would be mostly a rectangle, but instead mistakes made it a silly shape and it is too late to give cities like Missoula back to Idaho now. It is enough that we know that really, the most beautiful part of Montana, is really Idaho.
From the hotel, there was a very large building visible across the Snake River and so Tim asked the check-in clerk what it was. She replied “That is the temple of the LDS Church.” I found this interesting in that she didn’t say that it was the Mormon temple, as though she had either been coached by her employer (as this could hardly be an unusual question) or by her religious upbringing, to not say Mormon. I didn’t realize it was a pejorative term, and perhaps it isn’t, being just less correct. But seriously, saying “Latter Day Saints” takes too long!
I know Mormons take a lot of crap and I am convinced it did Mit Romney in despite his personal millions to throw around plus whatever the church could come up with and they command a lot of cash. But it is a religion that is shrouded in mystery and no doubt some misinformation as well. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be one and I have not appreciated their more recent hate-based forays into politics, a move I am sure is designed to assure more traditional freak Christians that they hate fags and love the unborn just as much as every other “right-thinking person” does. I grew up with a lot of Mormons and I would say that as religions go, they take care of their own. You just don’t see a lot of Mormon’s on welfare, their kids are pretty well scrubbed, bright shiny teeth and hair, well dressed, polite to a fault, and do well in school, never in any trouble to speak of. You could do worse when you think about it.
OK, yeah, the whole seeing through the stone glasses, the Native American tribes being a lost tribe of Israel, magical underwear with bullet stopping power, oppression of women (well, can’t count that one…seen any women priests lately?), being grilled by Joseph Smith, Jesus, and Saint Peter for admission into heaven requiring that secret password again, all that stuff, I would say is pretty strange to my eyes. But, I ask myself, is it really any stranger than insisting in a virgin birth or believing in what is literal cannibalism during the transubstantiation of the host and wine in communion. I mean, even if you don’t go whole hog and buy that it ACTUALLY turns into human flesh and blood, which is what you are supposed to believe, then it is still ritualized cannibalism and I am gonna go out on a limb and say that is rather tasteless, crude, and gross, to put it mildly. Didn’t you all go forth to civilize the cannibals, not just cause them to worship dinner? And don’t get me going on the local snake handlers! From a logical perspective, anyone with half a brain has to see it is all bunk and bullshit whatever the flavor of the month is, but I accept that some people need a magical answer for what they can’t understand or explain, and that is totally fine with me as long as you don’t try to force me to behave according to your rules. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to behave according to mine! To each his own and don’t worry about saving my soul since I don’t believe I have one, and if I do, well, I got a foretaste of hell and I sort of liked it.
The following morning, we headed out north and east for the West Yellowstone entrance. I don’t know how many people have a realistic concept of where Yellowstone is, but while the bulk of the park, by far, is in Wyoming, slices of it are in Idaho and Montana. Our entrance, since there isn’t actually one in Idaho, was the one in Montana, at West Yellowstone. We could have flown there, but fares were considerably higher and there was no Hilton property to stay at for free using points, so we settled on Idaho Falls. West Yellowstone is immediately outside the entrance to the park, and the park boundaries are the same as the city limits. The roads and sidewalks literally end where the park starts. The town is designed for tourist traffic without doubt, so if you needed a tacky T-shirt, this is where to go. We were hungry and being familiar with Xantera pricing, the concessionaire in National Parks, from our experience with them in Death Valley, we figured we should eat something first. As Tim perused the menu, he wondered about the buffalo burger. Perhaps he thought it was just a larger version of a hamburger, but whatever he thought, he didn’t ask me first. Really, he should have. Instead, he asked white trash over-the-hill-and-on-her-way-back-up hag Thelma, our “server” with the scorpion tattooed on her left boob, what the buffalo burger was. She looked puzzled and told him it was a buffalo burger, leaving the implied “duh” unsaid. So, Tim, still not understanding being from too far east of the Mississippi apparently, asked if it was just a bigger burger, did it have different stuff on it like barbeque sauce, what was different about it? Ah, the light bulb went off for Thelma and she realized, being clearly not the brightest bulb to light in a tourist town, that we must not be from there and that Tim didn’t realize it was literally a buffalo burger, as in bison meat. Yep folks, out West we do eat buffalo, or bison as they are properly called. Buffalo technically live in Africa and Asia, whereas bison live in Europe and the United States. Bison can interbreed with cattle whereas buffalo cannot among other differences. Bison have been tamed and raised for meat for a number of years now, and some say it is better for you than beef, being lower in fat and cholesterol. I really can’t tell the difference and choose to not pay the up charge for bison. Perhaps needless to say, Tim not being the most adventurous eater outside of Indian restaurants, he didn’t try it either. Had it been swimming in curry however, he might have. But no, come to think of it, he won’t eat the goat or lamb at Indian places either. I will eat the goat but lamb is murder most foul! See, goats are a pain in the ass whereas lambs, while stupid as the day is long on the summer solstice, are at least cute and cuddly.
After lunch, I had a brain wave and realized it was Labor Day weekend. Now in my youth, Labor Day was most likely a day to do exactly that: labor. We didn’t make much of holiday weekends and the only thing significance about the day was probably that at least I didn’t go to school on the Monday or Friday of. Beyond that, I didn’t think much of it, and I still don’t. Little did I know that hoards, literally Mongol-like HOARDS of people actually travel on this weekend and go to places like, you guessed it, you saw it coming didn’t you, Yellowstone. Now call me pissy, but I get annoyed with traffic jams in National Parks. I understand it happens all the time in Yosemite these days, but given that it really is just a big U-turn, what can you expect? Seriously, it appears we are loving our National Parks to death, but given that we pay serious cash to get in, $20 a car, there is a dilemma I think. If no one visits, then revenues are lower and they can’t be maintained as well, but the more we visit, the more maintenance is required. And speaking of maintenance, the road in part of Yellowstone was closed, meaning that to get up to the northwest entrance and the largest hot springs in the world (seconded by those in New Zealand that we will see in December) we would have to detour for almost 2 hours in both directions. We would ultimately choose to not do this.
So, there we were along with thousands of others in Yellowstone. We did make lots of stops for the plentiful bison, elk, and even a bald eagle perched up above the river glaring down at us. But of course the draw in Yellowstone is the geothermal action that is so readily visible throughout the western part of the park. If you have never seen a steam fumerole or vent, where you can actually see and hear super heated water escaping the earth, or seen mud boil outside of a spa resort, or seen fantastically colored water, that is sadly scalding hot and thoroughly infested with bacteria, hence the color, then perhaps you haven’t lived yet. When one walks through clouds of sulfur steam blowing off of the Grand Prismatic Spring, for example, and you are momentarily lost in the mist yet mysteriously warmed at the same time, you come close to forgetting that you are still on Earth. Then the mist clears and you realize you are momentarily freezing as you readjust to what is actually a reasonably warm late summer day. The experience is truly otherworldly with an ethereal grandeur I truly believe you have to experience to really understand. Sure, you can look at pictures, and if you haven’t been to Yellowstone you really should, (and not just ours but really good ones like those at: http://www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm), but this won’t really prepare you for what is inside the park and nothing can. There are other parts of the park that are a verdant dreamland, with little hint of volcanism, that are well worth the effort to visit as well, along with the volcanic Yellowstone Lake. Ooops, I think I may have lapsed into some purple prose majesty of my own there, but really Yellowstone is the sort of place that does that to you. It does it better when there are not thousands of others surrounding you, granted, and that was why we did a U-turn and escaped the park the way we came in, vowing to return when everyone else left.
Yellowstone had some devastating fires recently and the scars of that still show with lots of dead snags about, but what also shows is the recovery process that happens when we leave nature alone to do what it does best: heal. We have over managed our parks as well as over visited them, and since tourists want green trees, we don’t let natural fires keep the underbrush in control, as would normally happen, so that when a fire does start, it quickly goes out of control in a way that the forest is not adapted to. Many species of tree require the heat of a fire for their seed pods to open. Wonder why? Fires remove underbrush and allow clear fertile ground for seeds to sprout and also remove competition for nutrients and sunlight for seedling trees. Fire is nature’s form of weeding her garden, and if allowed to occur naturally, it rarely is hot enough or enduring enough to damage mature trees. The West has created its own catastrophe with building where we shouldn’t, not managing fire perimeters around houses as we should, and over suppressing small fires, all creating bigger, hotter, deadlier ones in the process. Of course, out of work firefighters who set fires are a problem too, but really, we have created a great deal of the mess ourselves.
But, we marveled at how quickly and effectively the landscape was returning in the aftermath of the fires and that too is part of the experience of these wild places, seeing nature heal itself when needed.
Beyond healing, one has to marvel at the life you can see the signs of all over Yellowstone in the most unlikely of places, but which you can’t see directly without a microscope. I mean of course the bacterial colonies that live in scalding and even boiling water and mud throughout the park. These “extremophiles’ live where it was long thought nothing possibly could and we are learning more and more about them daily, which it turns out is probably a good thing. I doubt that many of us realize that most of the drugs we use to kill bacteria come from either other bacteria or fungi, although I think most of us realize that the now largely useless penicillin comes from a ubiquitous and totally harmless mold [well, Penicillium marneffii isn’t so harmless, but it really is only found in Southeast Asia, so when my bronchoscopy fluid (NOT a procedure I recommend, water flooding your lungs, even when quickly sucked back out, is so unpleasant) grew a Penicillium species and my NP wanted to know my travel history, I quickly fired back that I hadn’t been to Thailand and that it wasn’t P. marneffii. He was a bit surprised that I could read that far ahead, but while I don’t know yesterday from a hole in the ground, I remember my lab work brilliantly]. Well, turns out, that one of the problems we are facing in coming up with new drugs for soccer moms to misuse on their kids so we can create a new epidemic of resistant bacteria, is that the sources we use are all known to the bad bacteria (not all bacteria, not even most, are bad for you. Without them, for example, you would never digest food and would get really hungry) and hence are not much good as new drug factories. But the extremophile bacteria are novel in their mechanisms and hold promise in helping us stem the tide, at least temporarily, of new and novel resistant infections from bacteria long thought dead and gone.
For my purposes in Yellowstone though, they create the beautiful oranges, blues, and greens you see in the geothermal features. Life always finds a way.
And of course, this was another foretaste of what I am promised by many in the afterlife, a sulfurous hell of eternity. As long as there are boardwalks and frat boys, as there are in Yellowstone, OK, I can live with that.
The other thing I think you can’t help but realize while in the park is that you are actually in the crater of a massive super volcano whose eventually re-eruption will destroy most of the United States and quite likely at least temporarily solve global warming by creating a volcanic winter effect by blocking the light of the sun with ash and debris for years. And of course, if you really hate Mormons, the temple will be going down for good when that happens, so rejoice! But seriously, Yellowstone provides a visible reminder that our planet is far from dead inside, and all that heat and action is coming from what is beneath our feet every day. That sort of power isn’t impressed with anything we as humans can or cannot do, for we couldn’t stop or control it if we tried. Nature will win in the end, of that I will make a bet. We can harness these features to drive clean energy in the form of geothermal, but we likely wouldn’t do it in a National Park per se. But if you ever doubted what you were taught in science class, and by that I mean real science class, not the “God created the Earth and dinosaurs and children played together” version, about the mantle and inner and outer cores of the Earth, Yellowstone might convince you otherwise.
I have loved volcanism since I was a kid and went to Mount Lassen National Park in California. The west has lots of volcanoes, many of them active, including Mount Lassen, but also Mount Saint Helens, Mount Hood, Mount Rainer, and many more. These are all in the Cascade Mountain Range and they do occasionally rumble, and some day, we hope not in the near future, cities like Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, are going to have a big messy problem when they blow.
Tim is a more recent convert to volcanism, by which I do not mean that we throw virgins into volcanoes and chant, besides, where on Earth do you FIND a virgin! He marveled at what remains of Mount Saint Helens, circumnavigated Mount Hood, and did a direct flyover of Mount Rainer, as well as climbed and stared into the craters of multiple volcanoes on Easter Island and sailed past countless others in Chile, and in the Azores stared into AND sailed past several more, but this was his first time actually setting foot into the crater of a living volcano. This isn’t as dramatic as it sounds since the crater floor is hundreds of miles wide, but still, technically, it was a crater and it is oh so very alive.
Old Faithful is so reliable because the crater is still alive. And yes, we did see that erupt as well as numerous other geysers that day as we hiked the trails around the different features of the basin. We did this on Tuesday, after everyone else went home, so it was much more pleasant. I always get the urge to grab a sniveling brat and “accidently” toss it into a mud pot when there are children about in Yellowstone just to see what would happen to it, how long it would take it to stop screaming now that it had a real reason to do so, and then of course probably discover something about Federal penitentiaries, which is typically as far as I get before I realize that there is a flaw in my plan. I have been to a Federal prison before and really I just don’t look that good in khaki. And by the way, just so you don’t ideas, I was WORKING at the time, not a resident.
We exited the park on our second trip into it via Grand Tetons National Park, directly to the south of Yellowstone. Sometimes I feel sorry for the Grand Tetons since they are sort of the overlooked little brother of world famous Yellowstone. But, having seen the crowds and the processions of fume spewing RVs in Yellowstone, maybe quieter and less visited Grand Tetons really has the best deal after all. The park preserves a range of mountains named, in French, to literally mean “large breasts.” Unless you know a French woman really well, never say to her, “Tu avec grand tetons!” Of course, you would only address her as “tu” instead of “vous” if you knew her, but decidedly do NOT say “Vous avez grand tetons!” The French seemed obsessed with tits if you ask me, or at least French explorers do. They were in the region not colonizing or killing Injuns, they were simply exterminating anything with fur, and apparently longing for the tetons of the mademoiselles of the motherland. They were doing this in Antarctica too, well not the furry animal killing so much since there are not any, killing whales instead I imagine, but in that case the teton was named for a particular mademoiselle named Barbara. From the mountain they named after her, I would judge to her tetons to have been tres grand indeed!
The park is quiet and really appeals to hikers and more hard core campers I would think. You can see the peaks from the road, sure, and you can watch the Snake River with the Canada geese skimming along on the way to the wintering grounds in the south, but to really “get” the park, you have to park the car and hoof it. If that is your bag, you couldn’t do much better than the Big Boobs National Park, better known in French to avoid the ire of the right wing as Grand Tetons.
The day in between our days in the park, we ventured down to Salt Lake City, holy central for a surprisingly large number of people. We got a gander at the Temple, which is impressive of course, but also noted the checker at the garden gate who was screening out the less than desirable. I assure you, we fall within that category. I don’t know what they do in there but whatever it is, non-believers can’t defile it. I think all that Tim really knows about Mormons is what South Park told him, which admittedly isn’t all that nice, but then you wouldn’t expect it to be would you. To be fair, Matt and Trey don’t seem to like Scientologists, or Catholics much either, so they have a pretty well rounded take on most major faiths. It is better left unsaid what they did in relation to Islam, but suffice it to say that it was a challenge to their network to dare to censor them, and the network did. Since Jesus has a cable network access show in the town of South Park and joins the other major deities in a fight against Satan, who is upset with his boyfriend Saddam Hussein at the time, (yes, Satan is gay, that is why all gays are evil, get it?), I think it pretty fair to say that I will be seeing Matt and Trey in person in hell eventually. I don’t know how we will work out the confusion over which Matt they mean. Hmmm, we will have to work on that, or gasp, wear name tags for eternity!
Salt Lake City is a perfectly lovely place though. It is in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, which perhaps surprisingly to many, often retain snow year round, and of course to the west is the Great Salt Lake. The lake is the natural consequence of the bad planning that created the Great Basin in the first place. Much of the water that runs to the west of the Continental Divide, if it can’t reach the Colorado River and eventually the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean, has nowhere to go, and thus it ends up in inland lakes or basins, many of them seasonal or now gone for good, drained for distant cities and farms. The Great Salt Lake is VERY salty since evaporation pulls the water out and leaves the dissolved mineral solids behind, the same as in the ocean of course, but on a MUCH smaller scale, and when you reduce the amount of the solvent (the liquid) the solute (the solid) steadily increases in concentration. Eventually, presumably, the lake would disappear into a salt flat, a giant salt lick across the land. These exist and are mined in the Sahara for example. Morton mines the lake too and just extracts the water to get at the salt. Of course, there is more than just good old NaCl, sodium chloride, or table salt, in that water. And by the way, if you want real sodium chloride, get some pool chemicals like muriatic acid, which is really just hydrocholoric acid, and some Drano, which is really just sodium hydroxide, mix the two together until you get a white solid floating on the top, and that is real NaCl. Believe it or not, Morton adds dextrose, a type of sugar, to your table salt to reduce the true saltiness of it all. Americans, eating sugar even in their salt! What next?
When I was a kid, like 4 or so, we went to Salt Lake City as part of a cross country trek to Ohio. I had to have a certain post card of the lake, only because it had a small canvas bag of salt stapled to it. I was told to not eat all the salt at once, but of course, being a child, I did exactly as I wanted and not as I was told. I puked rather promptly, for while salt is vital to life, too much of it works brilliantly as an emetic, something to make you vomit. So when Junior eats something he shouldn’t, you can make him vomit it out by forcing him to drink very salty water. But do this only on the advice of a poison control center operator, since vomiting corrosives like bleach or drain cleaner, will actually make the situation worse. But it works OK for when Crystal is playing at suicide with the cold capsules.
For some reason, I thought it important for Tim to lay eyes on the Great Salt Lake. We did and I have to say that it looks like a big lake in a desert. It really isn’t awe-inspiring to look at, and you shouldn’t swim in it, since even though you can’t sink in it because the specific gravity is too high to allow that from all the dissolved solids, which we will collectively refer to as “salt” (salt in chemistry really just means a compound composed of a metal and a non-metal, so technically thallium fluoride, for example, is a salt but you shouldn’t eat it as it will kill you), and some of those salts in the lake are not people friendly. But we saw it for what it was worth.
I do have to chuckle every time I see the Great Salt Lake, thinking about those brave, and perhaps mass deluded, pioneers following Brigham Young across the desert, coming upon a great lake only to discover you can’t drink it or irrigate with it. And yet, they settled there anyway and built a thriving city, state, and world religion. Maybe there was something to be seen through those stone glasses after all, even if all it really was proved to be the indomitable spirit of humanity. Even dumb and deluded humans can still accomplish a great deal, and sometimes, that is what makes me nervous. After all, Seventh Day Adventism got its start with the prediction of the end of the world, which has been adjusted several times, clearly, and those folks even operate hospitals and all! You just never know do you? Maybe silliness and capability really can go hand in hand! And Catholics, well they practice cannibalism weekly, or so they believe, and they have accomplished a few non-freaky things as well. OK, now I am really scaring myself as the enemy is smarter than me!
We returned to Salt Lake City, at least the airport, for our flight home. This time, I did find out what it was like to fly in Coach for the first time this year I think, outside of commuter jets where there is no choice. Clearly, I survived and I suspect I was mostly asleep anyway. I have to mention one person in the airport because it was important enough to write about him, or at least his t-shirt, in my flip pad. His t-shirt, and remember this is Salt Lake City, holy of holy places for Mormons, not a flexible and humorous people in my experience when it comes to anything god-related, read, and I quote: “Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten.” I thought it was hilarious. It so reminded me of my t-shirts in high school; one read “Nuke a Godless Communist Gay Baby Seal for Christ” or “Join the Army: Travel to Distant Exotic Lands, Meet Exciting Unusual People, and Kill Them.” Obviously, the point is not that god really does this, but that the idea that somehow an omniscient and omnipotent being could really give a rat’s ass if you manipulate your own genitals is hilarious too. Now, a group of tribal people wandering the desert as nomads do need to keep the population up, so I can see how jerking off and wasting that seed would be a problem, or how terminating a pregnancy when you have no means to provide for the child or a desire to raise and nurture it, would create a problem over time. However, I think if people are going to continue to follow a religion founded by wandering tribal people, they either need to return to the desert and wander or get a grip on updating their theology to match their reality and the reality of an overpopulated world. Until that day comes, I will still be here as a thorn in the side of all of you who are a bit too self-righteous, wishing I too had my own cable access show, you know, right after Jesus And Friends!
Cheers and happy journeys to you all. Next installment is after our huge 35-day adventure through Japan, Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand. And, we are taking requests for 2010 destinations you would like to hear my twisted and sarcastic take on. So, send me those ideas!